Gamasutra expands upon the story of Valve's firing of engineer Jeri Ellsworth with the report that as many as 25 staff were fired by the developer yesterday. Details are scarce, though after contact with some of those involved, they say: "the impression we get is that these cuts were driven more by company challenges than by individual performance issues." They also have a speculative list of those who may have been let go by comparing the company's employee directory to a cached version from last month. Following up, Engadget has a statement about this from Valve Managing Director Gabe Newell:

"We don't usually talk about personnel matters for a number of reasons. There seems to be an unusual amount of speculation about some recent changes here, so I thought I'd take the unusual step of addressing them. No, we aren't canceling any projects. No, we aren't changing any priorities or projects we've been discussing. No, this isn't about Steam or Linux or hardware or [insert game name here]. We're not going to discuss why anyone in particular is or isn't working here."

Post CommentEnter the details of the comment
you'd like to post in the boxes below and click the button at
the bottom of the form.

Loose Cannon wrote on Feb 15, 2013, 12:51:I realize that no one will probably read this, but I wrote a program to use the Way Back Machine (archive.org) to look at the employee directory. According to it:Total Hires: 143Total Fires: 35[...]

These figures point to the layoffs not being that substantial (of course that assumes that the employee directory is accurate, which it probably isn't). If anyone is interested, I have a list of the 143 people that have been in the employee directory at some point and their hire/fire dates (Way Back Machine started crawling the site 4/14/2010, when the page had 102 people on it).

No one at all read it sorry.

Actually, I'm interested in the proportion of the recent firings to the total firings. Its definitely not accurate since valve has had at least 200 employees at one point. Also, you list any absences as firings when there's like to be just as many (or more) people voluntarily taking a different job. But it will at least give a feel for how significant this is. From your list, the figure of 9 confirmed firings out of 35 total confirmed (well departures at any rate). So that's pretty significant, its also the biggest single loss since the archive started tracking it.